Tue 5 Apr 2016
Reviewed by David Vineyard: L. T. MEADE & ROBERT EUSTACE – The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[10] Comments
L. T. MEADE & ROBERT EUSTACE – The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings. Ward Lock & Co., UK, hardcover, 1899. Dodo Press, UK, softcover, 2009.
Before the Yellow Peril that reached its apex with Sax Rohmer’s diabolical genius Dr. Fu Manchu, there was the Italian Peril which had among its finer moments, Guy Boothby’s Dr. Nikola, and this novel by L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace.
Shades of cammora, omerta, and the Black Hand, the Brotherhood of the Seven Kings as presented here rivals not only the Mafia and Union Corse, but the Si Fan and Spectre, and its leader is both fascinating, beautiful, and evil.
So speaks our narrator, Norman Head, who met the dazzling Katherine in Italy and was enlisted in the Brotherhood only to discover the darkness at its and her core. Now it is 1894, and he has fled to London, where a consultation with Mrs. Kenyon, a friend, over her son, Cecil, the young Lord Kairn, introduces him to the mysterious Dr. Fieta, and to the stately and seductive Madame Koluchy — none other than his own Katherine: “That is the great Mme. Koluchy, the rage of the season, the great specialist, the great consultant. London is mad about her.â€
The poor boy, Cecil, is already in the hands of Mme. Koluchy and the Brotherhood who have evil plans to get the boy out of the way so one Hugh Doncaster can lay claim to money and title. Our hero, without so much as a thought, decides to follow them to Cairo where Dr. Fieta has suggested the climate will benefit Cecil, but from whence he will never return. Norman is made of sterner stuff and will not allow the child to be sacrificed to the sinister Katherine.
In Malta, Dr. Fieta slips away from him with the boy and heads for Naples, where Norman first knew Katherine, and dreads to go, but will follow if he must.
We are still only in chapter one, mind you.
Norman reveals himself as a member of the Brotherhood to Dr. Fieta, discovering the evil doctor has injected the boy with Mediterranean Fever to make the lad appear sick, but the latter will not be moved from his deadly assignment and in a race to save the boy Norman finally corners him as he is about to throw the boy into the sulfurous caldera of Mt. Vesuvius, and it is Dr. Fieta that dies there instead.
Vesuvius was a favorite scene for melodrama in British fiction in the 19th century, with many a villain or tragic lover meeting their fate there. Varney the Vampire ends his reign of terror in its fires as well. More recently Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child had their hero, FBI agent Aloysious Pendergast, confront his evil brother Diogenes among the sulfurous fumes of the great volcano (Book of the Dead).
The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings appeared as a serial in The Strand, and much like the early Fu Manchu novels each chapter is a complete short story around the central theme of Norman outwitting and foiling the evil machinations of the Brotherhood against targets in England. Like Conan Doyle and even Bram Stoker, it attempts to take advantage of the then still new ease of travel and communications by employing such modern inventions as steam yachts, railroads, telegrams, and science in general in much the same way writers today like Clive Cussler, Steve Berry, and James Rollins use technology.
For all the dated nature of books like this, they are the direct ancestor of the books at the top of today’s bestseller lists full of mysterious conspiracies and the like. Today the villains are Islamic extremists and evil corporate interests or shadow governments rather than Italian or Chinese secret societies, but the basics are the same; movement, mystery, incredible odds against one or a handful of protagonists, and general bad guy 101 activity. Here the conspiracies are personal as are the crimes, but they are only one remove from Carl Peterson or Ernst Stavro Blofield threatening England or the World.
L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace were popular writers in the Strand, who wrote numerous books like this. Both almost always wrote with someone else, him, perhaps most famously Eustace with Dorothy L. Sayers, his being a physician and much desired as a collaborator for the medical expertise he brought with him.
Miss Meade, Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith, an Irish woman from County Cork, seems to have been the storyteller of the two, penning over 300 books, eleven appearing posthumously. Her books ran the gamut from stories for young girls to sensational fiction, religious, historical, and adventure novels. One of her better known mystery collaborations with Eustace, with whom she penned eleven books, is The Sorceress of the Strand, which features Madame Sara, another villainess. She also collaborated with Dr. Clifford Hallifax (Memoirs of a Physician) and Sir Robert Kennaway Douglas (Under the Dragon Throne).
As he battles Mme. Koluchy, Norman acquires a friend and ally, Dufrayer, and the pair fight the female mastermind to a stand still, until like Moriarity with Holmes, her full attention seems focused on ridding herself of them. It’s always one of the puzzles of this kind of book that between adventures everything seems forgiven and everyone goes back to normal until the next adventure, until near the end when it is convenient for the writer, the villain finally has enough.
With Scotland Yard finally onto Mme. Koluchy, she is cornered, and more dangerous than ever. Having killed Dufrayer, she is pursued to her lair by Norman, where she disarms him by means of an electromagnet, and defies him:
And, true to her word, she springs her last deadly device in the furnace of her hellish laboratory that burns at a hellish 2400 degrees Centigrade taking a brave detective with her.
The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings is entertaining melodrama from another age, well enough written, modern for its period, and minus many of the excesses of the time period. Mme. Koluchy proves a fascinating mix of femme fatale and fiend, and our stalwart heroes at least aren’t as lunkheaded as Dr. Petrie and Sir Denis Nayland Smith in the Fu Manchu saga. All in all it is great fun from the late Victorian period and more than worth finding (simple enough in ebook form).
You can hear in this simple tale of adventure and intrigue some of the same concerns abroad today, the same xenophobia and the same need to reassure the reader good old fashioned Anglo Saxon values will win out in the end. Like many of today’s thrillers, and those from other eras, it reflects both real and imagined fears of foreign influence, unspeakable conspiracies, and the darkness just beyond the light that haunt middle class imagination across the years. As the mystery novel has always been primarily about the restoration of order from the demons within us the thriller has always been about the thin line between us and the demons just outside our door, forces we have no control over.
If nothing else, it is a reminder the more things change in popular fiction, the more they stay the same.
April 6th, 2016 at 12:07 am
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose? i think you’re right.
I could never speak French, but to get as far as I did toward a doctorate, I had to learn to read it.
Most of it long forgotten by now, but not all.
When I go looking for this, and I will, I will have settle for the Dodo reprint. A quick look for a hardcover edition led me only to list going for $70 and up.
Curiously, another quick look on Project Gutenberg brought up several books by L. T. Meade, but not this one, nor anything else by her that looks interesting.
April 6th, 2016 at 5:42 am
My article on Scientific Detections recommends eight of Meade’s short stories (and tells how to find free e-books):
http://mikegrost.com/moffett.htm
These eight above-average stories are racism-free.
But my article also complains about the bigotry sometimes found in Meade’s lesser works. At her best, she showed talent. At her worst, she peddled bigoted junk.
I’ve never read “The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings”. But frankly, it sounds terrible. Way below the standards of the best Meade detective stories.
April 6th, 2016 at 9:29 am
Is the hero ‘Norman Head’ or ‘Normal Head’?
(Thinking of ERB’s ‘Normal Bean’ pseudonym.
April 6th, 2016 at 10:32 am
Norman it is, but I love the way you think.
April 6th, 2016 at 2:40 pm
I thought of Burrough’s Normal Bean too, but the review was too long as it was.
Mike,
It all depends on the reader. If you are going to read fiction from that period in most cases you will run into racism, which was a point I made in the review in discussing the thriller and some of its less attractive components. The Other, or the Foreigner has always played a role in thriller fiction. That Other or Foreigner has been at times Italian, black, Jewish, Irish, German (not the Nazis, but there was real prejudice against Germans in the WWI era), Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and today is most often Islamic.
That doesn’t mean I don’t see or dislike the racist aspect, but I see things I disagree with all the time in fiction and if not forgive them, at least manage to get around them if there are other qualities to the work.
The casual racism of that era is a sad fact, better confronted than buried. It’s a baby with the bathwater thing for me. This one was written in the era of ‘Wops begin at Calais,” and unattractive as that is, and I fully understand why anyone would avoid it if it bothers them too much, I think there is still reason to read these books with the caveat that their racial attitudes are dated and can be unpleasant.
Frankly if I start editing out any and all unpleasant racial comments I have to discard Chandler, Hammett, Latimer, Spillane, Sayers, Rohmer, Buchan, some Christie, Chesterton, and quite a few others I am not willing to dispose of. I don’t have an acceptable level for this sort of thing. It is or it isn’t.
Granted it can be more virulent in some writers making it a judgment call.
I’m reminded of a rant I read by Mordecai Richter, the Canadian Jewish writer, attacking John Buchan because in THE THIRTY NINE STEPS a Jewish character is described as having “an eye like a rattlesnake.” Mr. Richter’s ire was so great I went back and reread the passage, only to find that the individual who uses that phrase was (a). paranoid with delusions and mentally unstable (b). totally wrong about the nature of the conspiracy he uncovered, and (c). wrong about the race of the individual in question. Mr. Richer read the passage as a teen, took it out of context, and formed an opinion despite the fact Buchan was famously even handed with many peoples (though he hadn’t much use for Ghandi, but then he hadn’t much use for Churchill either so take it as you will).
Of course there are more problematic things in Buchan than that, he was a man of his time, but he was also a fiction writer being true to the voice of an unpleasant character.
I don’t suggest that is true of Meade, but look at the schools that try to ban Mark Twain because of Jim in HUCK FINN. Banning one of the greatest works in American literature for a single unpleasant word about arguably the only noble character in the book seems the extreme of carrying the baby with the bathwater thing too far.
I think the line has to be personal. I think when I mentioned xenophobia and jingoism and compared this to Fu Manchu and mentioned the Italian peril most readers, at least of this blog, understand that in a book from that time period that’s going to mean racial stereotypes.
This one is pure thriller fiction of the era, nasty foreigners, noble Englishmen, and an occasional bad egg abound. It’s like getting upset about bad Indians in a Western. Unless it is really egregious and outside the norm it has to be taken as one of the hazards of the form. Unpleasant, worth noting, but indicative of the time period it was written in.
These are definitely not detective stories, they are in fact melodrama, but pretty good melodrama. As you said Meade wrote some decent detective stories, but she mostly penned books for girls with a side line in melodrama like this. And frankly, if for no other reason than to compare this to writers of today like Vince Flynn who writes almost exclusively about Islamic terrorism, this one is worth reading for a historical context of the thriller genre during times of social and international upheaval. Confronting the prejudices of the past can be a valuable way to confront our own today (founded or unfounded, I’m using this only as an example of the thriller form staying true to certain tropes across the years not in a political sense).
April 6th, 2016 at 5:58 pm
The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings is here, complete with illustrations: http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/Meademen.htm#bro7k
I have no difficulties with most of the racism in nineteenth and early twentieth thrillers, just as I’m not bothered that the capitalists in Stieg Larsson’s books are depraved and dishonest. Oddly enough, what I do have problems with is the antisemitism of G.K. Chesterton. With other writers racism, of whatever kind, is usually an unthinking assumption, almost irrelevant to the plot, whereas Chesterton’s antisemitism seems to be deliberately dragged in. The Duel of Dr. Hirsch http://www.ccel.org/c/chesterton/wisdom/drhirsch.html is the ultimate example I know of.
April 6th, 2016 at 10:39 pm
I grant Chesterton is unpleasant in that aspect, but I still am not willing to ignore his work because of one aspect anymore than I am willing to damn Hammett despite the fact he remained to his death an apologist for Stalin long after even many other Communist had condemned the Soviet leader.
I’m capable of reading Celine, Genet, and Pound as well despite some huge political problems I have with them. It’s an entirely subjective reaction as to who you find too objectionable and why.
I have a Native American friend who is a huge fan of John Ford Westerns, and several black friends who are Tarzan fans, know of an Asian scholar who has championed Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu, and a genuine pacifist who loves Mickey Spillane novels. I tend to be of the school if they can get past it I can if there is a reason to.
That isn’t to say there are writers I don’t find objectionable, but in fairness I usually don’t like their writing and the political thing is just another nail in the coffin.
Even Sydney Horler, one of the nastiest humans to ever put pen to paper wrote some readable books. As I said, if I limited my reading to people who never said anything I disliked or disagreed with I wouldn’t be very well read. I like William Hope Hodgson, George Griffith, and Gustave LeRouge, all Edwardian era writers with one thing in common, they were virulently anti American. I like Graham Greene and John Le Carre, again both virulently anti American writers.
Like Emerson, I contain contradictions.
April 7th, 2016 at 12:53 am
“Like Emerson, I contain contradictions.”
Really?
The frightening thing about Chesterton was that he seems to have set out to incorporate antisemitism into his writings. With other writers their prejudices are mere prejudices – unthinking assumptions about what “everybody knows” – whereas Chesterton seems to be deliberately and intentionally malevolent.
It may be that because he was a better writer than most of the others I assume he knew what he was doing when he actually didn’t.
April 8th, 2016 at 2:56 pm
Like most human beings I contain contradictions, although unlike Emerson I make no claim to greatness. I do however have an education and feel no constraint about using it. I will quote who I wish, as I wish, when I wish.
Really.
If you want to discuss the subject I am happy to, snarky remarks don’t accomplish anything save to reveal where you are coming from.
Yes, the anti Semitism in Chesterton is distasteful as it is in much of the literature of the time. It’s a serious flaw, but one sadly true of many writers. Whether it is worse or more virulent in Chesterton I can’t say. I disagree with many things in his writing.
I can like the work of a writer who I have problems with and dislike another who I agree with on everything save his ability to write. I don’t hold writers of the past to as high of a standard as I do contemporary writers, and there are personal lines I draw as a reader, mine are as subjective as anyone else.
I make no case anyone else has to embrace Chesterton. Everyone has their own tolerance level, and I am speaking of his fiction, and not essays and the like. There is enough of his fiction where the question is not addressed to enjoy his work on that level if you choose to. If not, equally fine.
I’m certainly not defending Chesterton, but despite his flaws he was a writer of some power and skill and I treasure some of his works. The anti Semitism is one part of him, a part I hate, but it isn’t all. I just think that if we fail to make distinctions, if we dismiss or trash every unpleasant aspect of every writer of the past we impoverish ourselves and in some cases create a society where expression itself is constrained.
I find it a dangerous road to start editing the arts from the past based on our own more informed positions. Start eliminating anti Semitic writers before 1950 and you are going to thin literature out pretty heavily.
Frankly, Chesterton was a blustering intolerant pain in the ass much of the time, but he could and did write well and since he is dead and no threat to anyone these days, not that his gadfly status ever made him much of a threat to anyone, I have no problem reading the rest of his work if I enjoy it, I expect no one else to feel the same nor do I encourage them to. I encourage people only to make up their own minds and find out for themselves.
April 15th, 2016 at 2:01 pm
I’m with David on this issue. Are we to dismiss Shakespeare because some readers sense anti-Semitic messages in THE MERCHANT OF VENICE or to ban Mark Twain’s works because the have the N-word in them?
We need to separate the works of art from the person who created them.